Welcome

Background

In case you don’t know me, please let me introduce myself. My name is Steve Gailey and this is my Blog. I work for Splunk and my role is to help Financial Services companies get the most from Big Data and in particular the Splunk Big Data solutions. Splunk is a fantastic company and I’m pretty excited to be here. I left what my wife referred to as a proper job to work here.

Prior to Splunk I worked at Barclays. I joined Barclays Capital seven years ago and eventually found myself running Global Information Security for the whole group. I was lucky enough to have a fantastic team at Barclays who made it very easy for me to look good. I was once given very good advice which was to hire people smarter than yourself. The best bit of advice I ever took and it works for wives too!

Before Barclays I worked for quite a number of financial services companies including:

Deutsche bank

RBS GBM

Nomura

SBC Warburg

And several others

I guess I just couldn’t settle…

So what am I going to Blog about?

Well firstly I’m going to start recording what happens to me at Splunk. It’s a pretty exciting place and very different to other places that I’ve worked so it may be worth capturing. If I look back at Barclays there was plenty worth capturing there but I never did, so time to get things right.

I’m also a closet GEEK. Well, to be honest I’m not very good at keeping it in the closet. I have been involved with FreeBSD since the project started 20 years ago so I thought I’d record some of my trials and tribulations with that. I run an unnecessarily complicated (as if there is such a thing) home IT infrastructure which is primarily based upon FreeBSD and I’m always trying to push the boundaries and learn new things with it, so you will see plenty of that…

I also have some pretty unusual ways of relaxing. For the moment we will gloss over the archery and forging (iron, not money) and talk about software development. I programme to keep my mind active and as a result have produced some halfway useful tools and utilities. I’ll try to keep a log of what I’m doing in that space and will make available what I can. For instance at some stage I will post my PST file reader which does not require MS Outlook to be able to open, search and read PST files. I also have an interesting SkyBox utility and I will spend a lot of time talking about whatever project I’m currently involved in.

As for the rest, I suggest you just look around the site and see if there is anything which interests you.

Usual disclaimer

All the opinions shown on this site are mine (unless the site has been hacked) and I stand by them. If I print anything which offends you I apologise and suggest that you avoid this site in future to ensure that you aren’t offended again.